Scott > Scott's Quotes

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”
― Wystan Hugh Auden

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“J. Malachi tried to count sheep, feeling that this was a practice which should be revived in the modern era, but he got bored after about seventy. This is what I get for being a deracinated postmodern, he thought. I've lost touch with the agricultural roots of culture.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“She kissed him then, with the same mixture of wonder and irony with which she kissed the cross in church. She didn't always understand that, either.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“He had a dilapidated body and a face like the last days of the Raj: jowly, discredited, eager for the final defeat.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“You are constantly looking for some solution, the thing you can do that will make you better and kinder and - and burn fifty pounds using this one weird trick. You're looking for the answer, like once you find it, getting your life in order will be easy. Stop looking for an answer and just do the things. Even when you don't know how.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Nobody can make up for what they did. That isn't how it works. You did something better than that: You got to a place where even the terrible things you did became a . . . a place for repentance, and for someone to forgive you. That is much better than just getting back to the life before. I mean life before this happened just led to the things that happened. This way, the worst things you did became grace.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Applause washed toward her, liquid and sparkling. People in the audience held up their phones to take her picture, cameras held like candles. She had enough vanity left to wish for privacy. In heaven, she thought, tired and uncomforted, the lights will be even brighter.
Maybe there it will not be so bad to be seen for what we are.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Her voice became vibrant and raw, veined with passion. "You can never go back to the past. You can't heal their wounds or your own. Even God will not do this for you," and this was a bit controversial with her audience, but she believed she had proof: "Jesus himself was not healed--he came back from the dead with the wounds still in his hands and his body. He came back changed, but not healed. Saying 'I'm sorry' is saying that you will be different from now on. Your identity stretches to accomodate this thing you did to them. And in this way a relationship is formed between the person you have hurt and yourself.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“When you say, 'I do,' you cannot be sincere, because you cannot know what you're doing. You may want some idea called 'being married' but you have no idea what being married will actually require of you. And so your sincerity and your strength of character don't really matter. If you are a morally weak person you can still marry. You don't have to wait until you're ready, because you're never ready. And so it is with 'I'm sorry.”
― Eve Tushnet, Amends

“Yes. But I like Americans," she said, with a sigh. "Everybody likes Americans. You have to. It upsets them so much if you don't.”
― Eve Tushnet, Christ's Body, Christ's Wounds: Staying Catholic When You've Been Hurt in the Church

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idolized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands set up by their own law, and judge one another and God accordingly. It is not we who build. Christ builds the church. Whoever is mindful to build the church is surely well on the way to destroying it, for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it. We must confess he builds. We must proclaim, he builds. We must pray to him, and he will build. We do not know his plan. We cannot see whether he is building or pulling down. It may be that the times which by human standards are the times of collapse are for him the great times of construction. It may be that the times which from a human point are great times for the church are times when it's pulled down. It is a great comfort which Jesus gives to his church. You confess, preach, bear witness to me, and I alone will build where it pleases me. Do not meddle in what is not your providence. Do what is given to you, and do it well, and you will have done enough.... Live together in the forgiveness of your sins. Forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer